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(Photo by Mike Ehrmann / Getty Images) – Los Angeles Lakers
Now that the Los Angeles Lakers have won the NBA championship, they will soon be under pressure to do it again next season.
Laker Nation, it’s official: Los Angeles Lakers are your 2020 NBA World Champions!
It came after a 10-year drought that was the franchise’s worst run. They had to endure Kobe Bryant’s Achilles tear, the death of then-owner Dr. Jerry Buss, some questionable coaching moves, some questionable personnel moves, and six straight seasons of missing the playoffs.
Regardless, the Lakers’ headquarters, once an excellent role model for the rest of the league, seemed like a total joke.
But the Lakers’ turnaround began in earnest in 2017, when Jim Buss, son of Dr. Buss, turned 86 as a team executive and was replaced by team legend Magic Johnson and Rob Pelinka, Kobe Bryant’s former agent. .
The two hatched a rebuilding plan that began to take shape when they landed LeBron James in July 2018, while the second part of the plan succeeded when Los Angeles switched to Anthony Davis a year later.
Then Pelinka turned the limited amount of space in the team’s salary cap into a cadre of valued players.
New head coach Frank Vogel got everyone to accept the identity of winning with defense and fast break basketball, and so the Lakers came back as title contenders.
After enduring a tumultuous season that included Bryant’s death and a worldwide pandemic, the Lakers remained on their feet as NBA champions.
But of course, in Los Angeles, the fans don’t think in terms of individual championships, but multiple championships and the core of this team seems poised to bring home just that.
To win back-to-back NBA titles, the Lakers will need to do a number of things this offseason and not hold their own as they too often did during the Bryant era.
As Bryant himself once said, “next season starts right now.”
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